The Architecture of Dreadnoughts - Blueprints of Success

[Music] [Music] so the naval architecture of a dreadnought battleship note that this isn't going to be a exact discussion of the three-way balance between speed protection and firepower because that's more of a discussion of how you achieve a balanced design both for warships in general and battleships in particular and will eventually have its own video this is more about the fundamentals of hull design for a battleship and while of course this does involve fairly complex concepts such as the metacentric height of a battleship i won't be going into any great detail on specific concepts and formulas such as metacentric height as this is really suitable for its own separate video so you need to design adrenal battleship well where do you start there's various places to stop but for the purposes of this discussion let's first consider the bow during the era of dreadnought battleships are roughly speaking 1905 to 1945. bear in mind it's only about 40 years that you go from dreadnought to yamato the bow does evolve in a number of ways initially as something of a holdover from the late ironclad and prairie dreadnaught eras battleships were equipped with a ram bao this might also include some form of forward torpedo tube but the ram was the main thing now obviously a ram bao as the name suggests is designed to allow the ship to relatively speaking safely ram something and i say relatively speaking because even with the specially strengthened section of the bow that's designed for the actual punching a hole in your enemy if you're in a 20 plus thousand ton battleship and you hit something that is gonna offer any kind of substantial resistance there's a lot of energy involved and where there's a lot of energy involved things start to break even if your ram bow itself doesn't break the rest of the bow the higher part the stem might well crumble in and you'll see this in a number of accidental collisions as well as a number of uh deliberate ones so always bear in mind that a ram bell makes you better at inflicting ram damage on the enemy it does not render you immune from receiving damage if you happen to ram somebody now a rambowed battleship would generally have a relatively straight bow which would then curve out and forwards underwater to form the protuberance that would be the actual ramming part because obviously you serve your aims best by poking holes in the enemy ship underwater to let a bunch of water in rather than having a big spiky protrude prince on the very top of your ship which will poke a nice big hole in the side but probably won't do much other than cosmetic damage now the ram belt did have something of an unintentional hydrodynamic effect which will go into in a moment but as the vogue for ramming fell away as the dreadnough era progressed dreadnoughts moved to a straighter bow set up where the ram pretty much disappeared albeit that interestingly enough hms dreadnought's only combat kill would be against a u-boat using its ram nevertheless as time went on and it became more and more necessary to keep a ship dry which is another matter that we'll come and talk about in a little bit bells began to change once more as ships began to speed up the so-called atlantic or flared bow depending on which country you were in began to come more and more into vogue this is fairly self-explanatory at least in its latter term and this involves the bow overhanging quite considerably from the water line with the sides flared out this is designed to allow the ship to cut through the water the same as any other bow but when water sprays up or in rough seas when the ship hits a wave the idea is that this water will be mostly hopefully deflected or channeled away from the vessel rather than simply running straight up the bow and dumping itself onto the foxel which is both messy and can interfere with the main guns but also can slow the ship down considerably both for through sheer kinetic impact and because there's now several hundred tons of water pressing the ship's bow down and increasing drag at least until that water drains off the final form at least for drap dot battleships was the bulba spout now you might think well doesn't this look a little bit like a rambo only slightly less effective well visually yes and this is why i mentioned that we were going to cover one unintentional effect of the ram bell later on the bulbus bow is designed to allow a ship to be more efficient hydrodynamically which in turn means that it can either go faster for the same amount of power or it can reach a target speed using less power the reason for this is that when you're moving at any kind of substantial speed which dreadnought battleships as far as ships in general go pretty much are all the obviously there are faster ships like destroyers and cruisers but never mind uh the speed regimen of 20 plus knots which is typical for these kinds of vessels the single largest cause of drag to a ship i something that's sapping the energy that's propelling it forward is the bowel wave which as the name suggests is the wave thrown up by the bowel cutting through the water now what a bulbus bow does is because it extends past the bow of the ship it creates the pressure wave that would normally create a bow wave ahead of the ship and you might think well how does that help well the thing is the bulbous spell is obviously underwater and the bow itself cutting through the water is still there so the bow will also create its own wave however because the bulbous bow has created a wave first the crest of that wave goes up and then descends into a trough and that trough intersects the crest of the bow wave that's being generated by the conventional ship's bow now that creates a sine wave that's offset if you get the design of your bulbous bow correct by about 180 degrees which then cancels out the two waves and thus at least in theory the sea of parts around the ship's bow overall in a relatively calm and orderly fashion thus there is significantly less resistance for the ship as it pushes through the water now there's a lot of complicated mathematics that needs to be carried out in order to get the bulbous bow shape exactly right and exactly the right length to create this optimal cancelling out effect but the old ram belt actually had this effect to a certain degree because it also was an underwater protuberance ahead of the ship so it did start to create a kind of full spell wave ahead of the vessel obviously they weren't designing it specifically for this purpose so the cancelling out effect wasn't 100 or even close to it but even a partial cancelling out effect will reduce the overall forces slowing the ship down and thus weirdly enough ships with ram bells all other things being equal were slightly more efficient and used slightly less power to reach the same speed as compared to ships with flat bows which immediately succeeded them there are some issues with bulbous bells they obviously add weight and increase drag because there's more surface area of the ship underwater being subjected to friction however these effects are pretty negligible on a relatively swift vessel like a battleship and they're more keenly felt on slow vessels like freighters so that's the bow what about the rest of the ship well one of the key factors you've got to figure out is your length to breadth ratio that is what's the relationship between the overall length of your hull versus its maximum width now this is important for a number of reasons obviously a very narrow hole you can't fit a lot into it a very wide hole you can fit a lot into it but it has other effects on things like stability and speed which again are factors that we'll talk about a little bit later on but in general the breadth to length ratio will as a rule of thumb describe whether or not you're building a fast ship or a particularly slow vessel and that's because when you think about the cross-sectional area as opposed to the total wetted area of a vessel but the cross-sectional area is the bit that causes the most resistance generally speaking if your ship is very very long and relatively narrow then as far as the c is concerned when you're forging ahead through it your overall cross-sectional area is fairly small and this obviously means somewhat less resistance because you're not having to force quite as much c to move aside for you the length is key in part because you need space to put machinery in all other parts of your ship but also because it's to do with cross-sectional area relative to volume and therefore mass so you need to concentrate as much mass as possible behind as narrow a surface area as possible this is for example one of the reasons why arrows are very long but have a very small cross-sectional area looking forward however there are disadvantages to a long narrow vessel apart from the fact that you're not going to have much width of a hull to store things like guns ammunition and engines in one of the other factors is maneuverability if your ship is very long and very thin then when you try to turn you have a huge amount of area that's going to resist that turn and not a terrible amount of mass behind it relative to the overall surface area effectively the exact inverse of what you'd have with your thin bowel pointing forwards this means it's going to require a huge amount of energy to make you change direction and as a result a long thin vessel will usually be capable of fairly high speeds but unless you put a rudder that's literally the size of several barn doors on the back you're not going to be turning very quickly conversely if you make a ship that has a relatively low length to breadth ratio i.e a ship that's relatively short for its width then you have a lot more mass for a given sideways cross-sectional area and also because your rudder is mounted on the back of the ship and thus turning is effectively trying to make your ship into a giant lever to turn against the force of the ocean and the ocean is of course pushing back on a relatively short vessel the effect of the water on either side of the bow resisting the ships turning is considerably less through the lever principle than on a very long thin vessel thus a shorter beamier vessel is much more agile as a rule so part of your design consideration has to be how fast and how agile do i want this ship to be and then you trade off between the two as well as other considerations as we had like internal volume and you arrive at a length to breadth ratio that is most suitable for the design that you want generally speaking with dreadnought battleships the length to breath ratio would be somewhat smaller than for something like say a battle cruiser or a regular cruiser or indeed a destroyer and this amongst other reasons is why you can have a battleship that might be of similar displacement to the average battle cruiser but might be considerably shorter because when you look at the beam you'll suddenly find that the dreadnought battleship is considerably beamier than a cruiser or battle cruiser and therefore its overall volume will allow it to displace and roughly as much of course some battle cruisers do displace a lot more than their battleship counterparts but you'll tend to find that in those particular cases the overall dimensions are also far far larger in all respects in length beam and draft as opposed to the average dreadnought battleship contemporary so now you know your bow and you've decided what kind of length to beam ratio you want now what about freeboard now what is freeboard well effectively freeboard is the distance between the waterline at your normal loading condition and the top of the side of your hull seems relatively simple but of course this can vary a lot of ships might have a quarter deck i.e the aft part of the ship that is lower than the pokesale alternatively you might have a flush deck vessel like a number of us destroyers as well as most cruisers or you might have a vessel that just has a dropped quarter deck and the midships and folks a little high you might have a ship that has a raised foxel and the midships and quarter deck are lower or you might have something akin to some of the earlier dreadnoughts where there might even be a narrower raised section of the focsil but not necessarily the entire four part of the ship is raised up to a higher level now that is generally a factor of stability which again is something that we'll talk about a little bit later on but for the purposes of the discussion of freeboard there are two key considerations for dreadnought battleship and one is sea keeping which again we'll cover in slightly more detail later on and the other is your target profile and ship's volume overall now the target profile should be fairly obvious the higher up out of the water your hull is the bigger a target it is for enemy guns conversely the lower it is the less of a target you are for enemy guns whole volume is important because of course within the whole volume you have to put everything that makes your warship into a warship including things like guns men ammunition food engines etc etc and if you have a higher freeboard then you have a much larger hull volume and therefore you can fit more stuff in it whereas a low freeboard ship you have to start sacrificing something and since a gun is a gun is a gun if you have a say a 12 inch gun turret it's going to be the same size regardless of whether you've got a free board of 6 inches or 60 feet although 64 ball will be impressive to see um then you need to think about sacrificing other things so this is one of the reasons why a lot of very low freeboard warships such as the late era ironclads leading onto the early pre-dreadnoughts were should we say not particularly long range the other factor of that is the sea keeping issue which is simply the fact that if your freeboard is say four or five feet then waves are going to very easily wash over your ship which as we discussed earlier when we're talking about the bow is something of a negative and that's assuming you don't just flood out completely allow the uss monitor but a high free board will keep your ship nice and dry but at the same time has effects on stability and obviously increases your overall displacement and makes you a bigger and better target one of the main reasons why these later era ironclads and in some cases some of the early pre-dreadnoughts had such a low freeboard was because of the absolutely massive amount of armor they had to carry in terms of overall thickness in order to resist incoming fire and that meant that well the the armor was so thick that they could only make the armor belt relatively short in terms of overall height as opposed to length and that in turn meant they could protect a relatively small amount of the hull overall area and so they tried to minimize the amount of hull i.e the target and they had so they had to sort of cut their hull down to fit their armor with the advent of harvey steel and later crop steel enabling a much wider coverage of armor plate whilst offering similar or greater levels of protection the freeboard very rapidly climbed again as one of the major issues that was found with this early design style was that sea keeping was absolutely awful and this was one of the major takeaway lessons of the great white fleet in actual fact uh quite a number of vessels in the great white fleet had been designed either primarily or in large part at the very least for coastal defense and had relatively low free boards including the bow and this meant they did struggle somewhat when it came to navigating the particularly heavy seas on their world cruise as part of the great white fleet uh mata that was taken into hand as soon as the great white fleet returned and incorporated into the design of future u.s battleships an example of this partially raised freeboard can actually be seen on hms dreadnought herself as well as a number of subsequent british battleships and this is where you'll see if you look inside profile there appears to be quite a high forward free board but when you look at say a three-quarter view or other photograph you'll notice that actually this high section is confined to a relatively narrow strip down the middle of the vessel and the sides of the vessel as they flare out actually have a second level which continues along much of the rest of the vessel which is much lower now this is done for a number of reasons weight stability lack of need for volume desire to minimize the amount of air you need to protect with armor and so forth but one of the rather nasty side effects of it was that casement guns were obviously having to be mounted in the hull and if the hull along the sides is somewhat lower it means they're close to the water and thus waves and such like tend to flood them out a lot easier than if your ship is flush decked and has a relatively high freeboard to start with one potential solution to this issue is to simply move your secondary battery out of the hull itself and into the superstructure this is something that a number of ships including a number of years standard battleships actually would do there was also a slightly peculiar option that you could go for rather than deciding your freeboard by whole deck levels you could actually roll the entire hull up or down in a kind of ramp or slope effect something that is most prominently seen on ships like yamato which allows for a certain amount of continuity in the overall hull to be maintained whereas dropping down by the entire deck does tend to create stress points on the hull whilst also maintaining some of the advantages of having your free board higher in places where it matters and lower in places where you want to save weight another thing to consider is your superstructure and masts now you might think hang on a minute we're talking about dreadnought battleships here surely we don't need mass the age of sale is long past and to be perfectly frank if we're in a situation where we have to rig a sale for our dreadnought battleship whether or not we've got a mast is probably the least of our concerns well you might be correct on that count but masts have other uses now to be fair in the early era of the dreadnought battleship the mast didn't have to be quite as large as it would get later on but it turns out that masts are very handy things to stick things on when you need something to be up very very high but you don't want to build a massive pyramid or office block in order to get to that height of course later on in certain battleships the idea of building a gigantic office block on the ship was incorporated but those were for other reasons nevertheless with the mast initially the main thing that you would have on there would be spotting because well the higher up you are bear in mind this most dreadnought battleships were built in the pre-radar era you can see further and this is generally held to be a good thing as range finding and fire control systems came in they also needed to be mounted fairly high because once again they were optically based systems and they needed good line of sight masts were also relatively useful for running cables in order to hang your flags from because signal flags as well as your naval ensign were very much in vogue obviously the naval instance still is signal flags they're still around but somewhat less important now than they were back then when they were pretty much the only form of communication outside of the odd signal lamp by the time of the dreadnought battleship radio technology was also very much in place and so for and aft masts were great places from which to string long radio antenna both for transmission and receipt of long range radio communications as time went on of course there were secondary fire control directors that needed additional rangefinding equipment installed and there was of course the advent of radar and radar although it is an electromagnetic form of detection still needs a line of sight because at the end of the day visible light is just another part of the electromagnetic spectrum and unless you're pulling really funky tricks with long wave radar to try and see over the horizon you really want your radar to be as high up as possible so it can see as far as possible and even if you're gonna pull the long range uh radar trick with long wave radar you still need it mounted as high as possible so that you can get the maximum line of sight and then of course you have things like anti-aircraft guns now whilst you can't mount a heavy anti-aircraft gun like a four and a half inch or five inch weapon on a mast right up to hi well you probably could but you'd run out of ammo very quickly you can mount some lighter weapons as well as in the early part of the dreadnought battleship age anti-torpedo boat weapons and so you can see the demand for mast space and mast supporting load grew very quickly as the dreadnought battleship era went on and even some of the earlier things like rangefinders and fire control systems themselves increased in size and weight so even though you might still have a fire control director the same in hms dreadnought as in hms vanguard the size weight and complexity of the one in vanguard would be considerably greater than the one in dreadnought and so the impact on the mast and therefore how strong it had to be would change quite considerably and so how many masks you're going to have how tall they are what kind of mask they're going to be how strong they are etc etc is actually quite a key consideration point when it comes to the design of the dreadnought battleship and that's connected to the other part of the ship's structure that isn't guns above the main deck and that is the superstructure now in initial dreadlord battleships the superstructure was generally speaking a relatively low key affair for similar reasons as to why you didn't build a ship with massively high frequent because you didn't want to provide such a massive target a tall superstructure would be a very inviting target and for stability reasons as well as just general surface area could not be particularly heavily armored if at all and so well you didn't want a giant flammable pinata going hit here to kill lots of people aboard a warship let alone a battleship and so as we said superstructures tended to be relatively small they were generally confined to things such as accommodation general non-flammable stores and of course the bridge but similar to the mask the demands of radio communication fire control equipment occasionally hydrophones and sonar as well as the increasing complexity of already installed systems such as the fire control equipment led to superstructures generally speaking increasing quite substantially in size now you had some odd hybrids such as the japanese pagoda masts which kind of tried to blend the mast and superstructure together you had various pyramid shaped structures you had the superstructures being extended aft so that they formed a much more considerable portion of the ship's overall profile uh hopefully without incorporating the funnels you had of course the british idea of the so-called queen anne's mansion which was just built what appeared to be a gigantic block of flats on top of the ship and stuff everything in one nice neat relatively speaking aerodynamic package and that's just the forward part of the superstructure where the bridge would be found amongst other things the aft superstructure grew and fell and grew and fell as time went on in the last part of the dreadnought battle shapira it could often be found to contain something like an aircraft hangar for the battleship's aircraft at the very late stage this would be taken out and replaced with other things like additional crew accommodation and storage for the massive number of light and medium anti-aircraft weapons that might be found on such a vessel and in earlier eras depending on what was inside the hull of the vessel you might find a relatively minimal half superstructure just there to provide a platform for a few anti-torpedo boat guns and support the rear mast or you might find a fairly substantial structure designed to accommodate men equipment and possibly other things as well whilst not strictly dreadnought battleships the indefatigable class of battle cruisers are a relatively well quote-unquote good example of a large rear superstructure in as much as they exemplify the case rather well but at the same time the aesthetics are pretty appalling now all of these things to one degree or another will influence the ship's stability and stability is a hugely important part of a warship's design especially a battleship's design and it's not quite as simple as you might think you might think well obviously you want your ship to be as stable as possible so surely the most stable vessel is the best vessel well not so much the most stable vessel would be something that was very broad and as we've discussed having a very broad vessel will lead to things like your ship being relatively slow and so that's not necessarily a good thing the other thing you've got to account for even though we're not discussing armor and detail is that a broad ship requires quite a lot of deck armor and deck armor occupies a huge amount of surface area as compared to belt armor and so making your ship a little bit broader as opposed to a little bit higher will actually contribute to a much greater increase in the overall weight you need to devote for armor for a given thickness as opposed to just having to increase the belt in height a little bit more even though the belt might be considerably thicker than your deck armor but nevertheless a very unstable ship so let's say something that's very narrow very high with a relatively shallow draft will of course roll pretty much all the time there were ships that had a reputation of rolling with great enthusiasm shall we say to quote one particular sailor that he said his ship would roll if it was left unattended on a wet lawn now as was covered in the fire control and plotting video this is not good for your navel guttery because if your ships constantly go pitching well pitching and rolling left and right up and down etc it's going to be very hard to draw a bead on anything for more than a second or two at a time and if your ship is particularly unstable that's really the best case scenario if it is properly unstable then well you're looking at something like the vassa or hms captain i.e one particularly strong gust of wind and over you go and that was all she wrote but why is a vessel that is really really stable a bad idea for a dreadnought battleship well it comes down to how a ship recovers from a roll if a vessel is very unstable then it's going to roll a lot but that roll is going to usually be relatively slow both because it's covering a much larger area and because it doesn't really have all that much motivation to settle itself back up right now a slow roll is good for gunnery because a slow roll imparts relatively little motion to a shell in the vertical element at any given time but also because it's a relatively slow rate of change it can be compensated for a lot more easily an ultra-stable ship will want to effectively pop back upright pretty much as fast as humanly possible now this is good to a point for example in a relatively flat sea it means that the small waves and small crests and troughs that you're going to be encountering will induce the vessel to roll pretty much not at all so you'll say alone feeling that you're on a nice flat level surface you'll have excellent gunnery because your guns effectively aren't moving at all except where you point them which is great however the minute you get into any kind of significantly rough sea which is capable of pitching and rolling your vessel as we said your vessel is going to snap back to vertical as pretty much as quickly as it possibly can and this is actually very bad because it's going to be snapping your ship around rather than gently correcting it and that's going to throw your gunnery off really really badly to use a real world example if you had something like a nerf gun or something of that ilk maybe even a real one although i really wouldn't advise doing this with a real one because the potential for things going horribly wrong is fairly high let's let's use our nerf rifle example let's say you're trying to shoot a can with a nerf rifle and you're standing 20 yards away you can take aim and you can fire and after a few shots you might even hit something now if somebody was to grab you from behind by the arms so you've got a relatively limited traverse for your nerf rifle and they were to then spin you say about 90 degrees to the right slowly and then 90 degrees to the left slowly and so on and so forth you will be able to take the occasional shot at the target but the vast majority of the time you're just not going to be anywhere close to being able to point your gun at the can in question and so this kind of simulates a very unstable vessel now if that person were to say on a slightly more rapid basis but still fairly regularly rotate you back and forth on say a 45 degree arc as opposed to a 90 degree arc then you're going to initially have a few issues shooting but if it's a relatively regular you can see the target most of the time and you've got a fairly predictable sweep hopefully within a few shots you'll start to land somewhere near the target because you'll be able to anticipate what's going on you'll be able to think ahead you'll see the target come into view you'll begin to line up your shot before you you're actually bearing on the target and then you pull the trigger happy days so this is a kind of a happy medium where the ship rolls but it's not completely unstable now with a super stable vessel again using a that 45 degree arc maybe even a 30 degree arc imagine the same person's grabbed you but instead of gently pulling you backwards and forwards over the course of a second or two they are instead basically whipping you to one side or the other they're just sharply jerking you in the matter of a split second off off angle 30 degrees then back on target then off angle the other way 30 degrees then back on target and they're properly yanking you about the chances of you ever hitting something are pretty much slim to numb because your vision apart from anything else will just about be recovering in time for you to be yanked off in a completely different direction this is the hazard of the two stable ship and another quick example while you're at it it would be to say look at something like a large book if you have a very large book and maybe maybe bind it together with an elastic band just to make the comparison proper um now put it on its spine on a flat level service and assuming that you don't have preternatural balancing skills it might stay vertical for a little bit and then it'll slowly keel over that's a very unstable ship now put it flat on the same level surface now you're representing a very very stable ship then lift it up by one side lift that side off by maybe an inch or two and then let go and you'll notice it just snaps straight back just drops very very sharply with a bit of a bang straight down onto the vertical that's a too stable vessel those are the two extremes and you don't want either so when you're taking account of all the requirements for your dreadnought battleship in terms of naval architecture this is one of if not the most important things to calculate and it's very difficult to calculate this is where the metacentric height of the vessel comes into play amongst other things because you need to know not only how heavy is your ship how long it is how wide it is how much freeboard there is but you also need to know where all these weights are in a ship because you could have a ship that has exactly the same whole dimensions as a second vessel but if on one vessel you load all your heavy weights right down in the depth of the ship it'll be really really nice and stable you put all those weights just up on the deck of the ship and the ship will probably just flip over the minute a strong breeze comes along and to be honest if you haven't loaded it really really carefully probably just flip over in dock so again the two extremes but you need to know where all these various weights are and this is one of the great secrets of naval architecture and ship construction especially when it comes to battleships because unlike almost any other warship a battleship deliberately has a number of very very heavy loads very high in the ship namely the main gun turrets these are completely ant ethical to any kind of actual stability because one of the key rules of stability is to have as much of your heavy load as deep in the ship as possible the higher the load is the more unstable your ship becomes and so balancing these factors out becomes a critical part of any dreadnought battleship construction this is for example why amongst other reasons the russians when they were designing the gangut and its various derivatives went with the so-called flat iron approach where all the turrets are on the same level they could have gone for super firing but a super firing set of turrets would involve having two turrets at least if you're going with the the gang guts four triples mounted in a position that was at least a deck possibly more higher and that would make the ship less stable and when you're trying to build a ship that has to deal with an awful lot of ice buildup on its upper surfaces which will further increase uh well further decreased stability increasing the loads higher up you you really don't want to be in any way shape or form contributing to the ship being less stable to start with and hence the so-called flat iron approach actually makes the ship a relatively stable combatant if it happens to be covered in ice and that's before weight considerations of a taller barbette and all these other kinds of things come into play as well so with all of this sorted you might now have something of a stab at trying to work out what the sea keeping of your ship is going to be the sea keeping has a number of factors pretty much all the ones we've discussed already to be honest and a few other other minor ones thrown in but sea keeping is a measure of how well your ship is able to remain operational in terms of its main mission whilst it is at sea now you can in theory make a ship that's brilliant for sea keeping if you all you want to do is transit across the ocean in that case you just put a really high free board on it but as we said adrenal warship stream battleships there's a lot more to your mission than that sea keeping how the two main factors that come into play are water over the bow and water along the sides and in a few cases like hms hood the battle cruiser occasionally water coming up the stern um but the water along the sides this is a combination of the bowel waves and just general wave action on the vessel depending on the speed it's going at this form of seat keeping is a annoying but secondary concern because it can if the water reaches high enough wash out the casement guns making them unusable the reason why this is a secondary concern is well it affects the secondary battery so this might affect your ability to counter enemy destroyers and torpedo boats it in some circumstances might count your ability to actually act against enemy capital ships with your secondary armament although this is going to be a very much a lesser concern and to be absolutely honest with you if on a well-designed vessel your casements are being flooded out then the seas are probably high enough that a small ship like a dishware torpedo probably isn't going to have the most fun time trying to get close to you anyway however that's on a very well designed ship you can make design errors it may not even be that your entire casement deck is flooded out although that can happen it may simply be that certain placements of casement guns are constantly getting flooded out because of where the bow wave sits as it washes down the side of the hull the queen elizabeth class were quite famous for this some of their casement six-inch guns could be fought in reasonable weathers but the forward casement guns were absolutely awful and at practically any speed in practically any sea they would just something of a swamp so eventually the solution was just plate them off and get rid of them but the main part of sea keeping to be perfectly honest comes down to the bow and we've already discussed some of the aspects about the bow but two major parts of sea keeping when it comes to the bow are both how much water does it take over the deck because of pitch and how much of the water does it take over the deck because of its overall shape now the two are related but in terms of its overall shape that's just as you're driving through a theoretically perfectly flat sea is the bow throwing up a lot of water when it's bow wave obviously the faster you go the more that's going to happen and there are ways to reduce that which is like the bulbous bowel but some water is always going to be thrown up and when that water is thrown up does it come over the deck because if it does then it can cause problems not only are you loading the ship down causing the ship to bury its bow slightly further into the waves which is gonna allow for even more water to come over etc etc kind of a vicious feedback cycle until the ship's buoyancy pushes it back up but also that water is going to run somewhere now it may run off the side of your ship and indeed most of it will but some of it will run further back and when it runs further back then it has this annoying habit of interfering with your forward guns which are a rather important part of your main battery now some ships amongst other measures would try and get over this with these deflector plates which they would install which would try and run the worst the water off but they have mixed success because a lot of the rest of it also depends on the pitch of the ship now as we said a a very long ship is very fast and obviously you want to minimize your cross-sectional area you don't want to just stick a barn door on the front of your ship because that's a nice big flat profile will have maximum resistance so very fast vessels generally would have relatively fine bows which means relatively thin and pointy ones this is great for speed but it does also mean that the overall volume of the bow is actually pretty small if the volume of the bow is pretty small then when a ship hits a wave and it pitches up and then pitches down that bow will cut down into the water very very nicely and efficiently and it will keep going and going and going until as more and more of the forward part of the ship is submerged eventually you get to a point where enough of the ship's bow is submerged that there is actually now positive buoyancy because a very thin bear might have negative buoyancy i if you just cut it off even if it was perfectly sealed up it would be heavy enough to sink and dense enough to sink now then your bowel will pitch up but if your bowels dug really nice and deep down well there's now massive increase in the oval surface area of the ship that's underwater which is going to be a massive drag and slow you down and secondly there's going to be an awful lot of water coming over the bow which means that well your ford battery is probably not in for a particularly nice day conversely a ship with a somewhat fuller bow uh i.e somewhat fatter if you want to use that particular word wider a bow that widens out a lot faster this type of bow will have a lot more forward buoyancy so that when it plunges down it's going to start to spring back a lot sooner and that will keep the bowel relatively speaking clear of water of course everything is somewhat variable because the waves are beyond your control particularly big waves particularly therefore large crests and troughs mean that in almost any ship is going to bury its power in the water but there's a point at which that happens which varies depending on the ship in question and of course if your primary firepower is your main guns and in a lot of ships if you have the uh most of your main gun firepower concentrated forward so vessels with three triple turrets tend to do that and as well ships like the king george the fifths and so forth then you really really don't want your forward main battery washed out by the sea in practically any weather so sea keeping is a very important factor next you have to consider the layout of the vessel now we mentioned that in passing with the potential layout of turrets obviously if you go with the four twin approach to forward to aft you have a relatively balanced layout if you have two triples forward and one triple aft or a quad forward and twin and a quad aft or if you go nelson style or richelieu style and you go with an all forward armament all of this is going to affect the overall layout of your ship because ideally you want your ship in trim that is on a nice straight level horizontal because if you put loads and loads of weight forward it's not just about the height it's also about where it is along the vessel your weight forward again your ship's just going to bear its bow in the sea if you put all your weight at the back well the barrel is going to rise up and then you're going to look like a gigantic overly armed speed boat which is just silly and also is going to completely obviate most of your armor scheme because all your armor at the back is going to be well under water all your arm at the front is going to be so far up that unarmored portions of the hull underneath it are exposed and your only well protected bit is a very finely balanced point to midships so the overall layout of where you put everything is very important and this can also affect actually when you talk about certain parts of the ship how other parts are laid out so this is related to the machinery as well as things like gun turrets because if your machinery is say triple expansion engines they're considerably taller than the average turbine which means you might not have the space midships for gun turrets such as a q turret and so you will end up if you want similar firepower having to put more guns and or more turrets at the for or aft of your vessel conversely if you have turbine engines then perhaps you can afford to have a q terror a midship somewhat like say the orion king george v uh kaiser or no actually the kernigs not the kaisers and the iron dukes you've also got to take account of things like wing turrets in the early dreadnought era uh two wing turrets one on either side possibly more means you're going to need a wider vessel because you've got to fit the superstructure in the middle and then enough width of the hull for a wing turret on either side as opposed to if you have an all center line armament if you're aiming for a relatively slow paced vessel so in 20 21 knots then you're going to have less machinery that if you're aiming for a medium speed say 25 knots or later on a high speed 28 30 or 33 knots the more machinery you have obviously the more volume you need and the more volume you need the more you display so therefore the more machinery you need and so on and so on and so forth and this is why very fast ships tend to go for that very fine length to breadth or length to width ratio because that allows you to have enough volume to stick all the machinery in you need to go really really fast without massively increasing your overall width and therefore overall cross-sectional area facing forward which would just result in loads of drag which would result in you slowing back down again and that brings us to another factor the torpedo defense system now we're not going to discuss that in terms of how it protects against torpedo attack that's more suited to a discussion on the protective side of vessels but the torpedo defense system will take up whole volume and how that whole volume is taken up is going to be a major factor in the architecture of your ship because you could mount the torpedo defense system externally in the form of bulges which allows you to maintain a lot more internal volume which allows you put all sorts of interesting stuff inside however of course that increases your overall area and cross-section which slows you down so you're going to have to take a compromise on that alternatively you could have your torpedo defense system built entirely into your overall hull layout which allows you to maintain a much sleeker approach and allows you to maintain much higher speed but of course that torpedo defense system now taking up internal volume means that you have less overall volume to put other things in the ship like say machinery shell rooms magazines crew etc of course if you have too small torpedo defense system then your entire ship might end up on the bottom at which point all your other nice design choices aren't really going to make much difference and the last thing we're going to talk about is materials materials are very important because ships do need to flex so in theory you could make a ship out of something like glass glass in very large volumes or a glass-like material is of course incredibly strong but also relatively brittle so it would just snap and well the idea of a 45 000 ton glass battleship shattering the first time it encounters a large wave is amusing to think about but perhaps not so amusing to be on so you've got to use a mix of materials you want more ductile materials for the overall ship's structure although they've got to be tough so they can bend but they're not going to tear rip or deform permanently very easily whereas obviously for the more protected areas of the ship you want stuff that's incredibly hard so resist incoming shot shell splinters shock waves and such like and the quality of these materials is also going to make a huge difference in terms of both their overall strength and toughness as well as their overall durability and fatigue limits now that's quite important on a ship because a ship is not just going to be flexed once it's going to be flexed constantly and the kind of steel you want to use in the overall construction of your vessel is a kind of steel that will flex back and forth and back and forth and back and forth within reasonable limits without losing too much strength whereas if you use something relatively soft like iron it's it's pretty easy to bend an iron nail to be perfectly get a soft iron nail and almost anyone with a decent amount of strength if it's a relatively long nail can just bend it in half but bend it back and forth a dozen times and sooner or later it's just going to snap that's again not a good feature for a battleship and this is why there's an awful lot of complexity when it comes to various types of steel that go into warship construction especially dreadnought battleship construction in the video about how to make armor we touched on some of the complexities of how to make that particular aspect of the ship but you can't just use any old steel in the rest of the structure for the reasons we've just outlined there was almost as much if not in some cases more science that went into how to make a battleship's hull material as went into the armor material because at the end of the day the armor material had one particular objective which was to resist incoming shells whilst the whole material had to resist longitudinal flexing lateral flexing rust constant fatigue shock waves having things drilled into it having weights put on it having those weights shift around all the time it had quite a lot to do shall we say now there are other things to consider said there's a detailed discussion to be had about metacentric height there's certainly a fairly extensive discussion to be had about various whole forms when you look at the top-down profiles of something like bismarck littorio king george v queen elizabeth and so on and so forth you'll tend to see a constantly curving shape and even with a ship like vanguard you'll see that albeit terminated by a transom stern which again is its own specific discussion but when you look at something like say an iowa class or the later as designed montana class and even to a certain extent things like the south dakotas and north carolinas you'll notice that whilst there is a nice rounding on the stern and there's a fairly arrow-like bow the amid ships of those vessels are almost entirely square they're just straight lines all the way down now there's a whole other discussion to be had about hull form and that's not something we can cover in this particular video because well discussions on those kinds of issues would take up pretty much this entire video's run time again so we will look at those at some point in the future along with in separate videos obviously things like how to balance your battleship between speed protection and firepower but for the minute that is a brief and very high level look at some of the major factors involved in the naval architecture of designing a dreadnought battleship there are plenty more to be looked at and we'll say we will look at those further on in the future there are plenty of books on the subject believe it or not and there are plenty of books on individual aspects of what we've covered just now 10 5 10 minutes for a given subject can't match the overall content of a three or four inch thick large tome but hopefully it will give you some idea of at least why things are important and the major pitfalls to avoid so once again thank you very much for listening and i hope to see you again in another video that's it for this video thanks for watching if you have a comment or suggestion for a ship to review let us know in the comments below don't forget to comment on the pinned post for dry dock questions

Channel: Drachinifel

Views: 297,416

Rating: 4.9180455 out of 5

Keywords: wows, world of warships, naval Architecture, battleship design, HMS Dreadnought, USS Iowa, HMS Vanguard

Id: xWEHL4S6qzw

Length: 53min 38sec (3218 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 22 2020